Landslides Hamper Relief Effort in Pakistan
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MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan – A halt in heavy rains yesterday allowed helicopter relief flights to resume across Pakistan’s quake zone, but fresh landslides hampered efforts to move supplies by road. Officials estimated the death toll could now be more than 54,000.
Pakistan said it was willing to accept an offer from rival India to send helicopters for earthquake relief operations, but without Indian pilots – either military or commercial. The nations have fought three wars since 1947, but India has sent quake relief aid to its neighbor.
“Pakistan was … willing to accept helicopters from India if these were offered without pilots,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “Given the obvious sensitivities, we could not accept involvement of Indian military on our side for relief operations.”
India has sent three relief shipments to Pakistan, including 100 tons of high-protein bars, 10 tons each of medicine and plastic sheeting, as well as tents and blankets, the Indian Foreign Ministry said. The latest shipment was sent in five railroad cars to the border town of Amritsar.
Eight international medical teams took off from Muzaffarabad to outlying villages, as fears grew for millions of survivors without health care and shelter in the isolated mountains of Kashmir, particularly the thousands of injured who need medical treatment to ward off infections.
American diplomat Geoffrey Krassy estimated that about one-fifth of populated areas had yet to be reached.
“There are serious patients with infected wounds and gangrene,” said Sebastian Nowak of the International Committee of the Red Cross, after a team of its doctors landed in Chekar, about 40 miles east of Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan’s part of the divided Himalayan region.
On the Indian side of Kashmir, conditions were grim yesterday.
Torrential rain and snow turned roads into rivers of mud, stranding trucks loaded with relief supplies for the worst-affected Uri and Tangdhar areas, officials said.
Officials on Sunday sharply raised estimates of the dead. A spokesman for the local government of Pakistani Kashmir, Abdul Khaliq Wasi, said at least 40,000 people died there, and the toll could go much higher. Not all the bodies had been counted and the figure represented the “closest estimate,” he said.
That pushed estimates of the total death toll to more than 54,000, including more than 13,000 in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province and about 1,350 in the part of divided Kashmir that India controls.
Confirmation of a final toll will be difficult because many bodies are buried beneath rubble. U.N. officials said that, so far, they were adhering to the Pakistani government’s confirmed casualty toll, which was 39,422.
The United Nations has estimated that 2 million are homeless.
Helicopter missions in Pakistan resumed yesterday after being grounded most of Sunday because of heavy rain and thunderstorms, which piled on the distress for the homeless across the quake zone.
Mr. Nowak of the Red Cross said one of its relief flights to Chekar had to turn back over the weekend because villagers were fighting each other for supplies. “They had sticks and they were fighting for relief goods. There was no perimeter security and we felt threatened,” he said.
Dozens of trucks have rolled into Muzaffarabad over the past day or so, but road access further afield remains difficult. The Pakistani military said it could take several weeks to clear landslides blocking routes to several valleys.